Lipstick Overkill, 2

CHAPTER TWO

Five hours after leaving Juraq, a slightly tipsy John Sebastian barely made it up to the command deck by way of a squirming metal staircase. Either it was squirming for real, or his perceptions just made it seem so. Even though he had learned from his last outing with his partner not to get too many drinks in his system, and even though he was only slightly affected compared to last time, the amount of “hospitality” he’d had was enough to have an affect on him that he wasn’t particularly sure he liked. He looked out through the viewport at the Karoomza Nebula and realized they were backtracking. “Where are we going now?” Another pickup?

Mumo turned from the console to watch him stumble in. “Come here.” He spun the chair next to him. “Have a seat and let me tell you a tale.”

Sebastian watched the chair spin, knowing exactly how it must be feeling. His head started to move in time with the chair… until he started to feel nauseous again. He squeezed his eyes shut quickly to prevent them from falling out of his head. “OK, stop the chair, and I’ll sit in it.”

Mumo grabbed the back of the chair and stopped the spinning. “All right. Here.”

Sebastian sank (melted, actually) into the chair and leaned onto the console nearby. “All right. Tell your tale. Make your sale.” He giggled at the rhyme, and suddenly knew he hadn’t recovered completely. A rhyme? A giggle?

Mumo brought him back to the moment. “All right. Pay attention.”

Sebastian nodded sharply, then wished he hadn’t as the room bobbed more than he wanted it to.
“About three years ago, there was a little place on the planet Garva.”

“Planet whosis? Garva? Never heard of it.” Sebastian had traveled quite a bit in the last five years. There was rarely a place he hadn’t at least heard of.

Mumo paused. “Well, it’s not really a planet. It was a planet a long time ago, but it blew up. Blew up rather spectacularly, so I’m told. Now it’s an asteroid field. Had a rather successful mining operation there for a while, but it played out about fifty years ago.” Mumo straightened, getting back into his tale. “Now, this little place on Garva --”

“Wait.” Sebastian held his hand up. “If the mine was played out, why was anyone still there?”
Mumo sighed and rolled his eyes to the ceiling for a brief instant. “The mining operation was based on one of the larger, more stable asteroids. It was also the only rock that still had a city on it. Ruins, but intact enough to justify an archeological dig. After the mine was dead, the dig site kept going for another twenty years or so. By that time, there was enough of a city built up that some people decided to stay. Some of them even thought about re-opening the old mine and see if there was anything left. It was into this little community that the place started up. It was a hole. It was a ramshackle, run-down, ugly little place.”

“And this is the fantastic dreamland where we’re going?”

“In a roundabout way, yes. Now, don’t interrupt.” Mumo settled into his seat as if he were about to share one of the greatest stories ever handed down by the Great Bird. “Now, this place was started by a man named Gemmon. A rather fussy young man who had a dream. A dream to create a magical place, a place where all your dreams could come true. A place full of wonder, enough to make you dizzy. A Dizzyland, if you will.”

Sebastian knew exactly what sort of feeling this place was meant to inspire, since he was feeling it pretty well at that precise moment.

“Now, Gemmon knew that in order to make the place successful, he’d have to make it popular. So he decided to make the place a bar. But that wasn’t enough, oh no. To be really popular… really absolutely popular… across the galaxy popular, he’d have to have girls.”

That surprised Sebastian. Mumo would want to go to a place with “Hookers?”

Mumo leaned back, surprised. “No, no no no. Not those kind of girls. Gemmon didn’t have the money for that kind of license, anyway. He needed girls who knew the important things, like how to make an Atomic Fizzbin or a Long Cometary Tail. Girls who knew how to make a decent drink.”

“Oh.”

Mumo was really getting into the telling of the tale, using his hands and arms and shoulders to punctuate his weaving of mental images. Sebastian thought he looked like a dork, but that was beside the point. “Now, this place started out as a bar with girls who knew how to make drinks -- ”

“I got that part.”

“You’re interrupting again.”

“Sorry.”

Mumo cleared his throat and started again. “This place started out as a bar with girls who knew how to make drinks.” He glanced sideways at Sebastian, who knew enough to keep his mouth shut this time. “But it wasn’t enough. Gemmon hadn’t settled on the right combination of elements to make this place the talk of the quadrant. So he bought more land and added a casino to the bar.
“The only thing is, Gemmon hadn’t counted on the rather obnoxious Anti-Casino Lobby Union that sprang up virtually overnight in that very same town. As soon as Gemmon opened the doors to the place, they were right there in the front with placards decrying the outrageousness of it all. Of course,” Mumo muttered conspiratorially, “the A.C.L.U. was really just a bunch of jealous competitors who hadn’t had the idea first. The only reason they made so much noise is because they never learned how to do anything else but whine.” He straightened and his voice went back into story-telling mode. “At any rate, the bar and the casino, which normally should do very well, did not do very well.”

Sebastian wondered how long this story would take. His head was starting to swim, and he didn’t like that happening without the rest of his body going along.

“So Gemmon had another brainstorm. In addition to the bar and the casino, he would add a -- ” The console interrupted him this time, beeping insistently at Mumo that it needed a slight course correction to avoid slamming into a nearby comet. Mumo pressed this button and turned that knob --

On a lonely stretch of space in the middle of the Karoomza Nebula, where the depth of gas is as great as the wealth of the planet Zag, the freighter spun on its axis and spewed another wash of ions and prions and chemicals and elements that followed Newton’s Law and strayed silently into the wake of the comet.
In an interesting juxtaposition of incidental elements (which some would later attribute to a freak accidental coincidence), the gas of the nebula, combined with the paint and prion-laden exhaust from the Y’mo’yto, combined with the dust and debris from the asteroid collision, mixed together with radiation from the comet’s wake, all washed together over a certain set of coordinates in the great vacuum of space. A set of coordinates that just happened to coincide with a very weak location in space that was also weak in the twelfth dimension...

-- and the comet was soon lost from view and the computer on the Y’mo’yto was once again blissfully ignorant. Mumo turned back to Sebastian. “Where was I?”

“You were about to add a …”

“Oh, yes. A barber shop.”

“Excuse me?”

Mumo nodded perfunctorily. “A barber shop. It was genius. Freighter captains, smugglers, derring-do spoiled rich kids out for a spin, all of them needed a good excuse to go to Garva because it wasn’t on the regular trade routes at the time. So Gemmon thought up the idea of providing high-quality haircuts, and he put a barber shop smack in the middle of the worst traffic stop for parsecs, and they just flocked to his place. Pretty soon, Garva was part of a new major trade route.”

“All because of a barber shop?” Sebastian couldn’t believe what he was hearing.

“Well, the barber shop and the ice cream parlor.”

“What?!”

Mumo raised his hands defensively. “Now, just hold on. You’re getting me out of sequence. Of course the ice cream parlor doesn’t make sense unless you’ve got the spa in place first.”

At that point, John Sebastian was certain he was still passed out in a drunken stupor on his bunk.

“Gemmon had figured out how to get the male population to frequent his establishment, but the women were another story. They don’t trust their hair to just anyone, and the ice cream parlor wasn’t in Gemmon’s brain yet. He figured what worked for the men would work for the women, though, but he had to put a twist on it. Make the men look good with a haircut, make the women feel good with mud. So he built on a day spa.”

“A day spa.”

“Then he put in the ice cream parlor.”

Sebastian blinked. Twice. “Oh, of course. Now the ice cream parlor makes perfect sense.”

Mumo turned in his chair to face the stars streaking past the viewport. “There was still something missing, though.” He paused.

For a long time.

The pause went on for what seemed to Sebastian ages multiplied by eons.

It was actually three seconds.

“The place didn’t yet have a name.”

Sebastian’s eyebrows shot up. “This whole big gargantuan fun factory didn’t have a name? How did people talk about it?”

“Oh, they just called it The Place at first. Then it was Gemmon’s Place as he got to be known as the proprietor. But even Gemmon knew he needed a name with some pizzazz. Some zing. Some panache. So he fuddled around in his apartment for about a week until he came up with Gemmon’s Pleasure Palace.”

* * *

On the outskirts of the Karoomza Nebula, the weak fabric of the space-time continuum decided to tear ever so slightly. It was a tear that should not have happened, but because it came from the twelfth dimension, the space-time continuum hardly noticed at all, so therefore did not bother to correct the problem.

On the other side of the tear a small teardrop-shaped spacecraft floated like a tiny bubble of metal in the vacuum of space. The crew inside were minding their own business, on patrol in search of a way out of the twelfth dimension, when they stumbled across a way out of the twelfth dimension. The energy from the transition caused the ship’s instruments to hiccup for a moment, leaving them blind and deaf to the outside.

On this side of the path, the tear sat silently for a moment (because the tremendous sound of the fabric of space being torn was swallowed up by the vacuum of space, of course), then blossomed. Almost as if spitting up a large chuck of goo, the tear deposited the small shell of a spacecraft. Inside the craft, several grey-skinned humanoids sat and tried to fathom what had just happened. They sat and stared at the stars, having not seen any for almost nine cycles of their old sun. As their instruments came back on-line, they started to piece together what had just happened, and savored their success (even though it was completely accidental, as most great discoveries are). For now they could exact revenge on their nemesis, their hated enemy. The spy who had banished them and their people to the twelfth dimension so long ago. All they had to do was find her. Then kill her. And their revenge would be complete.

* * *

“And that’s where we’re going? This Gemmon’s Pleasure Palace?”

Mumo took a breath. “Uhm, no, not exactly. This is still an unfolding story, John. Be patient.”
Sebastian was thinking he was being very patient. Enough to be a patient in any mental ward on this side of the galactic arm.

“Gemmon had seen a lot of Earth’s television broadcasts, and he knew he still needed a hook, something that would make people crave to be in his place. So he thought about it and thought about it. Then he figured it out. He needed a celebrity endorsement. Of course, he hadn’t the faintest idea how he would get anyone famous to patronize his Pleasure Palace. Reputations and all that being what they were in that day. Especially since the News and Education Administration had started their public relations campaign against anyone trying to be better than anyone else, and that included being better at games of chance. The N.E.A. made it so that no one wanted to be popular. It wasn’t the popular thing to do. So Gemmon had a dilemma. And then, just coming away from a particularly harrowing adventure, in an attempt to lie low for a while, she walked in.”

The way Mumo said it, Sebastian was sure it was almost a religious experience. He half expected to hear harps and choirs, and if he hadn’t been hung over, he just might have. “She who?”

“Liberty Lovejoy, Intergalactic Space Babe.”